Elizabeth B. Hall

Started Simon's Rock,
first school of its kind

GREAT BARRINGTON -- Elizabeth Blodgett Hall, 95, founder of Simon's Rock College, died July 18 at Geer Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Canaan, Conn.

In 1964, with 200 acres of her family's land and a grant of $3 million from the Margaret Kendrick Blodgett Foundation -- a charitable educational trust established by her mother -- she founded America's first "early college."

The idea for Simon's Rock grew out of her conviction that the American secondary school was failing to adapt to the changing nature of adolescents, who were maturing earlier and who were anxious to accept academic and personal challenges and responsibilities that their high schools did not provide.

She believed that many bright young people can do college work before the normal age of high school graduation, and she defined the mission of her college as providing such students with the opportunity to begin college after the 10th or 11th grade. The college was chartered by the state in 1964.

As Simon's Rock first president, between 1964 and 1966, Mrs. Hall articulated its mission, supervised construction of its campus, recruited its first faculty, developed its innovative curriculum and recruited its first students.

Her husband, Livingston Hall, who continued to work full time at Harvard Law School, and Doreen Young, a former teacher at Concord Academy who came to Great Barrington to become the college's first faculty member, advised and assisted her in the planning and development. Simon's Rock admitted its first class of 57 women in 1966; today, it has a coeducational enrollment of about 340.

Born in New York City on Nov. 16, 1909, she was the daughter of Thomas Harper Blodgett of Iowa and Margaret Carroll Kendrick Blodgett of Minneapolis and Chicago. She was tutored at home and abroad and attended the Ethical Cultural School in New York City. When her father purchased Great Pine Farm in Great Barrington in 1922, the family moved to the Berkshires. She attended local public and private schools before enrolling as a boarder at Miss Hall's School in Pittsfield in 1925. After graduating in 1928, she attended her father's alma mater, Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., for one year.

She and her husband were married Sept. 13, 1930, at St. James' Episcopal Church. They moved to Weston in 1932, when Mr. Hall was appointed to the Harvard faculty.

In 1942, Mrs. Hall resumed her education, becoming one of the first women to enter Radcliffe College as an adult. She commuted to Cambridge by train, arranging her classes on three days a week during the hours when her children were in school, and graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1946 with a bachelor of arts degree in government.

After graduate work in Washington and a year as a fund-raiser for the Cambridge School ofWeston,she accepted a position in 1948 as head of the history department at Concord Academy, then a small, Grades 4 through 12 girls' school in Concord. A year later, she was named headmistress.

During her 14-year tenure as headmistress, she gained a national reputation as one of the country's outstanding private secondary school educators. She served as president of the Headmistresses' Association of the East and as a member of the executive boards of both the National Association of Independent Schools and the New England Association of Colleges and Schools.

At Concord, she was known for her imaginative and idiosyncratic style: for chapel "talks" reminiscent of her Methodist grandfather's sermons; for teaching a philosophy and current-events course that she called "Stuff (& Nonsense)" to the seniors, and for the quixotic nature of her discipline. Misbehaving students might be required to saw lengths of firewood for the school's fireplaces, and a pile of waiting logs, kept outside her office, was a constant reminder to students to behave.

She taught students how to whistle through their fingers on boating trips down the Sudbury River and regularly pitched in student-faculty baseball games. In 1956, she, her husband and some friends dismantled an old church in New Hampshire and moved it, board by board, to the Concord campus, where it serves today as the Elizabeth B. Hall Chapel.

Her preparation for this project was renovating several 18th-century houses in Sandwich. Restoring old furniture and trunks were among her enduring passions, which also included traveling, shell collecting and raising show dogs.

She left Concord Academy in 1963 to return to Great Barrington to care for her aging parents.

In 1972, she retired from the presidency at Simon's Rock, but continued her involvement and philanthropic support as a member of the board of trustees.

When the college merged with Bard College in 1979, she became a member of both the Simon's Rock board of overseers and the board of trustees of Bard. She lived near the Simon's Rock campus, now known as Simon's Rock College of Bard, and remained an active and engaged member of both boards, becoming an emerita member in 1996.

Legally blind since 1982, she still managed to visit the Simon's Rock campus almost daily, driving a golf cart that she called "the Pumpkin," which bore the memorable bumper sticker "Hire a College Student While They Still Know It All." She also used the golf cart to travel about the remaining acreage of Great Pine Farm, which she posted with signs that read "Enjoy, Don't Destroy" -- rather than "No Trespassing."

The habit of leadership remained with her in the nursing facility, where she spent her last days. She felt obligated to direct and improve the organization, even when uncertain as to its name and purpose. Her charm and interest in others made them occasionally pay heed to her frequent suggestions.

She leaves two sons, Thomas Livingston Hall of San Francisco and John Kendrick Hall of Jerusalem; two daughters, Margaret Hall Whitfield Courant of Great Barrington and Elizabeth Hall Richardson of Denver; 11 grandchildren, and nine great-grandchildren.